


Coming Alive

by Neftzer_nettlestonenell



Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Backstory, F/M, First Meetings, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Illnesses, Inheritance, Miscarriage, Pre-Series, Rescue, Swordplay, Training
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-02
Updated: 2018-02-08
Packaged: 2018-04-12 16:01:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 21,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4485870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neftzer_nettlestonenell/pseuds/Neftzer_nettlestonenell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Athos and Milady (not yet known as Milady) encounter each other for the first time, from each of their POVs. "A man so discreet that she had learned not a thing about him personally was a man hard to grift. What secrets of value to Sarazin could she hope to possess if even the blandest of personal information were held so closely to his chest?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Athos

**Pt. I - ATHOS**

  
He will marry Catherine, he supposes. Surely that is their wish. _And why should he not?_ She is aimiable enough in conversation, her ancestors place her in the right sort of class to make his father smile upon her eligibility. To make him approve of her becoming his eldest son’s Comtesse.  
  
They will expect him to do this when he returns, of course. _And why shouldn’t he?_ Take a wife and begin having sons. A son, who should one day also become Comte. A wife he has known and shared a friendship with since they were children. A chateau upon his quiet countryside holdings.  
  
He felt nothing about the matter either way, he supposed. There were women, of course, more lovely, more alluring than Catherine. Richer women, more exciting women. There were handsomer, wealthier, better-titled men than he, after all. More exciting men living lives of greater excitement than did he.  
  
And yet there was not another woman to whom he would have to explain so little about himself, his background, the paths his life was meant henceforth to travel. There was not a female he could ever recall (including his own mother) in whose company he felt quite so comfortable. So easy.  
  
He did not question feeling so passionless about the decision. He felt passionless about everything. _Where was there anything within the life of a country vicomte about which to feel passion? To feel danger? To excite zeal?_  
  
There was the sword, as always. There was life and death on the edge of a blade. If he felt alive at all–if he had ever felt so–it was only ever with a sword in his hand.  
  
And yet his own pursuit of such a vocation was limited.   
  
A Comte must know swordsmanship. He must carry a sword always at his side. He must have been given instruction in swordplay as a young man. _But to put such lessons into practice? To duel? To cross swords with a foe intent upon one’s ruin?_ No, Le Comte must not be so careless. His people depended upon him. His family.  
  
He had told them he would be gone two weeks–no, six. Six, he has told his father, in the end, just before he went. Outside of Paris, he had said–deliberately vague. There is a man I must see about…business, he had said.  
  
His father was no fool. He, above anyone in the household, had known that his eldest son rose blisteringly early of a morning to practice parrys and thrusts, a new technique he had read about in some long-dusty text from the chateau’s library. His father Le Comte knew this business would be to meet a particular swordmaster, to study under him as long as his eldest son thought he could without being too strongly reprimanded, without raising too many eyebrows, disturbing too greatly the calm waters of life near Pinon.  
  
No one knew him here, this small, out-of-the-way crossroads, a forgotten stopover on the way to Paris. His family’s name was known by some, his wealth by more, his title not at all. But none knew his mind, none were in his confidence. Here he was alone.  
  
He had been to Court once, as a boy of twelve. His father having some rare business there. The child King received them, crying loudly throughout the audience. (Which his mother as regent oversaw anyway). That had impressed him. That he would be older than his King; wiser, perhaps. An elder brother. He had told Thomas this. Thomas had laughed at him. But Thomas laughed at everyone. Thomas, jolly in nature, pleased or charmed by everything.  
  
When Thomas had laughed Athos had decided not to tell him the rest. Not to tell him of the King’s Musketeers he had seen there in Court that day, their faces scarred from duels, battles, derring-do. The particular blue of their capes. The leather worn upon their shoulders distinguishing them as the first of all men in service to the King. He did not tell Thomas–never told Thomas–of having passed by, riding with the coachman through the backstreets of Paris, and seeing the garrison of these super-men, hearing the sound of steel on steel as they practiced with blades, the fine horses being ridden in and out of the place’s gates.  
  
He had felt something then. Later, weeks later, he had been taken by dreams in which he leapt from the coach, dashing away from his father, from returning to Chateau de la Fere, hiding in that garrison and begging whomever found him to let him do any menial task if only he might stay.  
  
It was too late for him now, of course. (As if a life in that sort of service to the King had ever been an option.) He had traveled here, nearly into Paris, with no servants, and employed none at his lodging. To his Madame concierge he left his laundering, what he ate for early and late meals. Of a Sunday he went to what stood for Mass. But what he did most–and best–and most happily–hour after a hour, day after day under the tutledge of the master swordsman, all-but blind from age and poverty, was feel alive.  
  
And attempt somehow to store up such feeling for the rest of the years of his life to come.

**...tbc...**


	2. (Anne) Milady

**Pt. II - ANNE**  
  
She should be exhausted. Her wits should have snapped with the constant strain and pitch of her life, living branch-to-branch - ever-necessary to be ready to jump to another tree, another ship, another man's arm almost since she could remember.  
  
She slept very little, as always, and when she did it was not particularly deeply. A guard such as hers ought never be fully down.   
  
Hers was a dramatic life, balancing her Fate on the edge of a blade: could she avoid same from slicing through it - through her thread? Or fraying it so she lost those very things that proved her appeal to men? Her looks? Her figure? Her intimate skills?   
  
Having a sharp mind, a quick hand at pickpocketing, an understanding of manipulating a mark - all important things Sarazin had taught her as he placed her by his side and in his bed. But without physical allurements, useless to him - to anyone - he had often reminded her.  
  
She was constantly attentive, senses alert. Perhaps it was a type of mania. Mania that in a gentleperson, or an aristocrat might be worrisome, but in a pauper orphan - sold to Sarazin by a mother who was shortly to die from drink and (possibly) regret - it was life. If one meant to keep on living it, and make the living of it worthwhile, and occasionally comfortable.  
  
But nothing lasted. Not even her turn as Sarazin's favorite.   
  
She had never really aspired to anything beyond the seat beside him, fetching, doing - whatever was asked of her. But the day came (the first of many) that another man - a compatriot of Sarazin's - offered something Sarazin wanted, and she was to be the price. And to help himself to double the profit, her lover-master sent her in payment, and fitted her out as his spy.  
  
She had found leaving his side more uncomfortable than she had expected, but she spied well, and when that man was brought down she returned to Sarazin, but he found his passion for her in his bed had past (or was now tainted by the acts she had employed at his demand upon his rival), and he chose instead to make use of her again, in similar ways, with other men.  
  
He had begun to fear she was becoming too well known, and he had no wish, he had told her - his tone attempting sympathy - for her to be known for the whore. So he began sending her out to inns and crossroads just beyond Paris where she had never been, honey-in-the-trap for rich men, for influential men on their way into or out of the city.  
  
The best that could be said about her present lodgings just outside Paris was that they were not muddy, but only due to lack of rain. There was enough dust to stuff mattresses, to fall like snow. For all she knew the populace here farmed dust, harvested dust, so plentiful it was in supply. Nary a table nor a counterpane was free of it for more than moments.  
  
To the people here she was a young widow, name of Anne. Anne's own family without standing, she had married an older man in his twilight years - to his family's disapproval. He had died not long after their wedding, and because she had borne him no child his family had tied up any living she might have had, any inheritance - in the courts.  
  
(It was a simple name, Anne. Thousands wore it before or after their first name. It was not the name her mother had called her. She had almost forgotten that word part and parcel of trying to forget that woman's betrayal.)  
  
That was Anne's story. Respectable young widow, pretty. Traveling to try and find family of her own that might take her back. Looking for a protector. It was not too long, not too intricate a story to keep track of, and in fact, she often liked to muse upon it, upon THAT girl; add embellishments to Anne's tragic tale. She got positively caught up in it from time to time, feeling sorry for Anne. Hoping that someday poor, unworldly Anne might find someone who would rescue her, hoping that Anne might find family to accept her again.  
  
When a man in his travels did fall in with her, she ate well, slept (an invitation to their chamber was nothing to procure) in the best beds of the inns they visited, judiciously plundered his belongings for items of value or important papers Sarazin might make use of in blackmail or political maneuverings in the hours when she could not sleep and yet everyone else did.   
  
And when she had taken what they had of use to her and to her master's interests, it was no difficulty to quarrel. The mention that Anne regretted following them to their bed, that she wished some promise from them - a position more permanent to be given her in their life - and like that, they were gone. Back to their wives, back to their mistresses. To their travels. Their work. Back to what stood for them as reality, and not idle folly and foolish whore-mongering with her.  
  
It saddened her for the young widow in her cover story. But, in truth, she had not thought it made her feel any way at all about herself. She worked for Sarazin. Had for more than half her life. As master, she owed her life and upkeep to him. He provided for her between marks. She served his purposes. His benefit was her benefit.  
  
She was between marks, now. But it had been awhile, longer than usual that she had stayed put in this place. It was more out-of-the-way than where she usually traveled, a satellite in orbit about Paris. And she had not been feeling well. Not like herself.  
  
In fact, for the first time in her life she felt listless. Dim, if one compared her to candlelight - where she was usually flaring, a startling blaze.  
  
There was a number of 'characters' hereabouts. Old women, ancient men, a few young couples. As a pious widow she was obligated to attend what stood for their primitive Mass, week after week as she waited - two weeks now - at one of the village's three inns, waiting to find her next carriage - wealthy lover inside - that would take her on to the next stop in that series of unending travels and intrigues Sarazin had set her upon.  
  
The young couples would come to Mass, have the Father bless their children.  
  
Children. Babies.  
  
Now there was an unsettling thought.  
  
Why did she not - had she not - taken what she had stolen from her last mark and returned to Paris, to seek out Sarazin, cash-out her booty, see if he had a better place to position her than here? Here where coaches almost never stopped, where the entire village population in total had less coin than did she?  
  
Had she known? She did not like to think she had known.  
  
She tried to remember if there was anything about - any symbol, any sign - she might have seen indicating this village might have a wise woman living amongst them.  
  
After all, she now had a new task to complete.


	3. First Meeting

He stared at the soft muslin garment before him as warily as a hunter might trying to gauge the ferocity of his potential prey.  
  
To one side was a folded stack of his clean laundry, returned to his room. As he had picked it up to place it off the inn's bed, THIS had fallen - slipped - out from among it.  
  
A woman's shift.  
  
But not just any woman's shift. He leaned in, suspiciously, to inspect its embellishments. They were many, and intricate. This piece of handwork had likely cost more than the concierge's entire cupboard of clothes. More than whatever they had paid for the small servant girl who kept their fires lit. It was a fine, richly-made bit of underclothes. A woman's underclothes.  
  
He had not yet touched it.  
  
He kept no servants here. Employed no man. There was no one to whom he could call out to have it taken away from him - to have this confusion, this mistake, set right.  
  
And he was filthy. Covered, post-day-long lesson in the persistent dust of this place, mingled with the sweat his exertions of the day under the tuteldge of his master had conjured from him. Without removing his glove, he snatched at the intimate garment, the middle of it wadded into his fist, and opened the door to stomp his boots down and toward the steaming kitchen and someone who could relieve him of this distracting burden.

* * *

He opened the great door to the kitchen and (he hoped) to the inn's Madame Concierge and found her - and another woman. As with many things these days that were not sharply shiny and potentially deadly in the right hands, he paid little mind to the other female present. He had been in a condition since arriving not unlike that of the master swordsman he had come to study under: blindness. If it was not a sword, nor a threat to him that might need be fought with a blade - it interested him little if at all. If he ate he did not notice it. He ate only for strength. If he drank it was only to supply his body with the fluid depleted from his workouts. If he spoke it was to this blind master, to the blade in his hand, to the few people he needed assistance from in order to devote himself wholly to his enterprise. He was an island of obsession unto himself, unto his sword. He did not imagine he could ever feel any happiness greater.  
  
Was this, he wondered at nights as his body lay, exhausted, being re-taught things it had thought it already knew - was this what it must be like to be born to play a violin - and never before have felt one in your hands? Was this passion? Was this finding yourself?  
  
"My sir," the concierge looked up from where she was at folding other laundry, shocked to find the quiet boarder in her kitchen, her look of surprise matched only by the disconcerted expression upon his at finding himself here. Both were rendered uncomfortable.  
  
"You have mistakenly left this in my room - " he said, his eyes scanning about the kitchen rather than meeting hers, his lips giving no name to item in his hands.  
  
"I do not know what you mean, my sir. 'Twas your laundry I brought to you, just as you asked."  
  
"No. I mean, yes. Of course you did. But this - which is not mine - was among it." He let part of the shift flow from out of his grip.  
  
"How terribly awkward," he heard another voice in the room - the other person - a woman, her voice like muted chimes; dark but soothing.  
  
His eyes snapped to where she was.   
  
"It would appear that you have been given some of the laundry I asked madame to wash for me - "  
  
The apples of her cheeks became brighter - tinged in red. Rather than giving her a blotchy complexion, it seemed to heighten the liveliness of her countenance. He had of course not intended to bring embarrassment upon anyone.  
  
"I am - I am - that is - " he looked for somewhere to put it down, to get it out of his hands. The concierge did not offer to take it. The lady was several steps across the room, standing upon the lower steps of a back stair. And a table stood between them.  
  
Far too long a moment passed while he still clutched the shift. His mind recalled to him the stitchwork upon it. He took it and put it down, rather clumsily - its neck lacings had become tangled with one of his gauntlets - on a table to his back, which was covered in unwashed parsnips.  
  
"Please accept my apologies for - any imposition," he said, his eyes clearly wishing for the shade of a hat to hide his discomfort with the situation. "Please be assured, it was entirely without intent."  
  
The lady gave the sort of nod and averted her eyes to show she accepted his apology. He did not wait for Madame Concierge to reply.  
  
The door shut behind him, and the two women were now alone in the kitchen.  
  
Several moments passed, as if both were waiting to ensure that he was not coming back.  
  
"As agreed," the woman known as Anne said to Madame Concierge, extending a coin toward the older woman's hand. "One introduction he will surely not forget."  
  
"Will my lady wish the shift washed again?" the innkeeper's wife asked.  
  
Anne looked from her perch on the lower stair over toward her best undergarment. "I should think so. He may be rich, and handsome enough in the face, but besides being utterly backward he's positively filthy."  
  
Despite her summation of the gentleman's shortcomings, she did not attempt to hide the satisfied smile now growing at her lips as she turned to travel back up the stair.


	4. Nothing

And then: nothing.  
  
No glances her way--not even furtively. This dust-encrusted swordsman who shared the inn with her, whom she had assured herself had coin enough to support her until she found her next target--he had not even the decency to actively avoid her. Instead--it was--his demeanor was--as though she were non-essential. He did not look past her, he looked through her--looked through them all. Such behavior went well beyond a lack of interest, into genuine lack of recall. Did he not spare a moment to consider their interaction?  
  
She could hardly understand it. She had given the man a glimpse--a feel, even--of her underclothes. She had affected a *blush* during their interaction.  
  
She enquired more vigorously with the concierge: this Athos, did he seek out other company? Was it not a lady's shift that was to his liking?  
  
The concierge had no useful information. He arrived at the inn only to sleep (alone), was gone all day. He paid his bills. He asked for nothing. He had once received a letter, which upon accepting from her, he threw into the nearest fire, unopened. He seemed to prefer being alone. To Madame Concierge's mind, the perfect lodger.  
  
For days Anne spent her time equally divided between three challenging pasttimes: trying to discreetly locate a wise woman, trying to hatch a plan to get this bumpkin's better attention, and praying (if one could call it that) for a better target to soon ride into (and with her, out of) this dusty village.  
  
And then, early one day, the services of a wise woman still not engaged, she woke as the sun was first weakly thinking about dawn, and she knew that whatever was happening to her body ought not happen in her room.  
  
She was in pain. But worse, she found herself in a condition which she had allowed herself to acknowledge very little: she was in fear.  
  
She got herself down the back steps toward the kitchens and the back privy, stopping several times of necessity, and leaned so fully upon the back door that it swung open hard, taking her with it, chucking her out into the going from dark-to-dim morning. She staggered toward the privy and got herself inside.

* * *

He had caught the scent of a change in the air with his rising. His senses, which seemed to have been newly christened only over the past few weeks, spoke to him of cooler weather on its way, and coming-on-wet in the air.  
  
He scowled.  
  
One could train in an unused barn, certainly, but it was nothing to training in the out-of-doors. And he seemed to recall his master suffered from some twinges of the body--memories of battles past--when weather changes like this came about that might well render him more feeble than usual.  
  
He scowled again. Best to use what he could of this day. He dressed and went out into the yard behind the inn to stretch and practice the prior day's lesson. It was early--even for the inn's servants, few if any of whom were yet up and out. But he cared not whether he met another person. He was for his practice. He was for his sword.  
  
He was concentrating on bettering his form when he was distracted (he swore aloud with the inconvenience) by someone stumbling out of the privy, its door hard-slamming shut. Their form was little more than a daub of white nightshirt in the not-yet-banished darkness before full dawn.  
  
He was trying to again find the middle-distance upon which to focus, when he realized that although they had by-and-large followed the path back to the inn, they veered to the far right of it before reaching its back door, and fell, collapsing to the ground.  
  
For a moment he stood his ground. A drunk, no doubt; last night hanging over into this morning. But something like curiosity had found a foothold within him. His senses, heightened, brighter and newer-feeling as though they had been polished--were they to blame for this? Curiousity required interest. And it had been longer than memory when he had truly been interested in anything. He existed in a perpetual state of disinterest, of bored remove. And therefore had avoided curiosity for much of his adult life. And yet here it was, this curiosity--this desire to investigate--strong enough that he could identify it.  
  
He sheathed his sword, (confused annoyance mixed with his piqued interest), and trotted over to see what he could.  
  
Even in the weak light he saw blood on the nightshirt before he saw whose it was. He went down on a knee. She may have been pale, he could not tell. Her eyes lolled about, unfocussed, even when he spoke to her to ask if she needed assistance.   
  
Did he remove his gloves and touch her skin? Gauge its temperature? (He seemd to recall his nurse using this gesture when he was a child.) His hands did not seem to know where to go: his swordmaster had not instructed him in this.  
  
Should she be moved? Should he try and raise her head? Slap her cheeks? He knew not. His eyes skittered over her insensate form and found no answers. Clueless, but feeling something must be done, he opened his mouth and bellowed (a louder noise than he had made in years) for Madame Concierge.  
  
"Madame," he said to the lady--the lady he was convinced was about to die upon the ground in front of him, "Madame--you are unwell!"  
  
The woman bleeding on the ground took a great, ragged breath, but still her eyes did not show she knew herself--much less him. Her hair, which must have started the night in a braid of some sort was wild about her head, her lips dry.  
  
The concierge arrived, standing over her two lodgers. Athos looked up at her. "A doctor, call for a doctor!"  
  
The concierge looked at him, unfazed. Looked at the lady on the ground, unmoved by her lodger's condition, seemed to consider prodding her with a toe. "And who's to pay for that?" she asked, "my lady's bill is past due."  
  
He looked from the woman on the ground to the woman standing over her, his mouth unable to shut in his disbelief.  
  
"I will," he told her, shocked at the woman's lack of concern. With outraged (and frightened) fingers he tucked into his purse and fumblingly withdrew a coin. "Send at once." In sterner tones he added, "Pray she lasts until he arrives."  
  
The concierge shrugged and ambled back to the inn to send for a doctor, wondering if her quiet lodger would soon also be paying the lady's overdue bill.  
  
She had not quite gotten to the door when she felt him behind her and had to step quickly aside. He had the lady in his arms--though she appeared too faint to even be holding on to him--and was taking the stairs with all haste to get her up into the warmth and privacy of her (unpaid-for) room.  
  
"Go!" he shouted at the concierge--or perhaps it was not a shout, but for one so taciturn it was as a volley of musketballs--and she obediently increased her pace to a scurry.

* * *

He did not wait for the doctor. Once he was satisfied that help was on its way he straightened his shirt, adjusted his sheath, and left for his master.  
  
He had done what he could, he told himself. His being there could not ensure her recovery. And were she to realize he, a stranger, had seen her in such an indelicate situation--well, such a realization could not make a woman happy, or easy.  
  
But he found it more difficult than usual to locate that core of concentration during the day's workout. And his master, as expected, was suffering from what the weather was about to bring. Athos had to try twice as hard to do half as well as usual.  
  
It was not there habit to stop for luncheon, and yet today both felt the need to break shortly after noon. Send your boy to the inn, he told the master, who lived with a young child that may have been his son (Athos had not bothered to ask), they will send him back with victuals.  
  
Half of the hour gone and the boy returned, with bread and cheese--a flagon of better wine (Madame Concierge knew well her best customer), and news that the lady had come to consciousness. Though what ailed her had by no means been cured.  
  
Athos gave a stern nod to this unrequested news, and was pleased to see that following their uncharacteristic repast, his concentration had largely returned to normal.


	5. Third Meeting

He had not been wrong about the weather. When the rain came, it came hard at first, then settled into persistent. Continuous. Everywhere there had been dust there was now mud. The inn began to swell with new lodgers, trapped by coaches unable to assail the sodden, grown-marshy roads.  
  
Doubtless Athos would not have noticed if he had been still able to pursue his training during this time, but the rain did something to his master beyond the aches from long ago injuries. It over-stimulated what senses the blind swordsman had left.   
  
Too much noise, too much motion. The man barely knew if he were coming and going. A day or two into the rain and it became obvious lessons going-forward were useless until the heavens dried up.  
  
Athos was sent back to the inn to practice past lessons, to fret, knowing that his own time away from Chateau la Fere was limited (as it always had been), and that the rain might stay long enough to whittle his six weeks into more like four, and a handful of days.  
  
Even so he resolved to practice, rain notwithstanding.   
  
Locating an unused barn, however, proved not as simple a task as he had hoped. He owned nothing here, was lord to no one. Barns and other outbuildings nearby this crossroads were perpetually in-use, as laborers needed them to be. He, the incognito vicomte de la Fere, was in no position to deprive a man of his income (or same man's family of food) by letting a barn and seeing to it all it held was moved elsewhere as he, Athos, had need of the space. They would have thought him touched to have suggested it.  
  
This led to more time being at and around the inn.   
  
Several days of it passed, him trying to do what he could out in the weather, behind the inn where he might trouble no one and not inspire spectators. When a rapid coolness descended with the continual rain one afternoon he felt he might go upstairs and retrieve something more substantial to wear. He was nearly to his room's door when he half-collided with the little maid employed there as the lowest servant.  
  
Her arms were full of linen to the point her small face was nearly obscured. How she saw her own way up and down the stair was anyone's guess.  
  
"The - lady - " he found himself asking of her, shocked into speaking by their abrupt proximity. "She is much improved?" He had since seen nothing of the woman who had collapsed.  
  
The serving girl looked as though she would rather not have this conversation. She was all eyes and no mouth, so few were her teeth. "I do not know, my sir."  
  
"Not know?" he asked, confused. "Do you not kindle her fire of a morning?" He, himself, had declined such services - preferring to be left alone by the inn's servants, but any lady, he assumed, would require such assistance.  
  
The serving girl looked even more uncomfortable. "No, my sir."  
  
"When did you see her last?" he asked, not knowing what the right questions in this situation were. Not at all satisfied that the girl was proving so ignorant on a subject that he had only passingly meant to engage her upon. "When was she last seen? She has not departed here?"  
  
The servant girl's eyes widened and she muttered an, 'I shall ask my mistress' into the linens before hurriedly scooting off down the back stairs toward the kitchen.  
  
Something seemed to recall to his mind that Madame Concierge had said the lady's rooms were past due. He had a decidedly uncharitable thought, and pushed it aside. Surely not.   
  
He looked down the corridor, testing his unconscious memory to see whether he knew which room was the lady's. Here came the uncharitable thought again: Could the innkeeper be waiting for this lady, her affairs in arrears, to die from her illness? Offering her no aid in the meantime? Thinking that to put out an ill, unpaying tenant might garner their business a poor reputation - but if she were to pass away from her sickness, (and their silent lack of assistance), they might instead have her clothes, her baggage - her anything.  
  
It was a distasteful thought, a beastly plan, no humanity in it, but the more his eyes scanned the corridor, the louder his memory recalled to him the concierge's detached disinterest in summoning a physician. The more a part of himself began to believe it to be true.  
  
He strode toward a door that he felt reasonably certain was hers and knocked upon it, clearing his throat as loudly as he might.  
  
There was no sound of an answer: only the persistent drip of rainwater still sloughing off his own soaked shoulders.   
  
He recalled a night terror Thomas used to have (perhaps still had): that he was in bed, unable to rise, and when he went to call for someone his voice no longer had any volume to his screams.   
  
Athos did not have night terrors, in point of fact he rarely if ever dreamed, and yet at some point he must have taken this fear of Thomas' as his own. He always imagined Thomas on that bed, unable to rise: laid out like the dead, his voice forever silenced.  
  
His brain took a stitch in its cloth, a dimple, and instead of Thomas he saw the lady - laid out as she had been when he last saw her, collapsed just outside the inn's kitchen door upon the ground. Blood on her nightclothes, insensible to the world about her.  
  
How many times as a boy - an older boy, the bigger brother - had he tried to calm Thomas after that dream? Long after Thomas ought not have still been under its spell, him being an older boy, Athos a young man, and his patience more than once spent on his younger brother's terrors; no pity, no comfort within him left.  
  
But yet, in this waking moment, this borrowed image of terror, of helplessness, gripped him. In response to it his breath came half-held, half-heaving. His need-to-know at this point was such that he chose to ignore convention and any manners of comportment he had ever been taught, and opened the door. (Pragmatically reasoning that either no one was within the room beyond, or they were too compromised to answer to his call.)  
  
The room held the scent of squalor, if not the look of it. It was tidy as could be: no food left uneaten upon plates, no mess or clutter about. A week ago it would have been a right tidy little room, most respectable. But not now. The curtains were drawn and the window closed, and the tight stench of illness and blood pervaded the space. Neither taper nor hearth were lit. Athos held the leather of his glove up to his face to fend off the odor and walked toward the figure upon the bed.  
  
He could see nothing to judge the lady's health by in the darkness - he could barely sight her - and so stepped to the window, opened the curtain and pushed it wide; fresh, wet air from out-of-doors flooding the room. Along with light enough by which to see her better.  
  
She was pale beyond fashion - beyond even the powder and paint some women employed (though he knew little of the specifics of such things). Her lips were bloodless. Even in his dim recall of their first encounter in that kitchen his mind assured him her lips had been bright as tart persimmons, her complexion rosy.   
  
Her color was now rather a lack of color. Her hair slack and untended. He saw no drink of any kind within easy reach of her, and at the foot of the bed the counterpane and linens had been pushed down by her feet. A sennight later, and they were still bloody.  
  
No one had been in this room but her. His eyebrows drew together in dislike of that observable fact. For how many days of the seven, he could not be certain. The doctor had been present on the first day, of that he was assured. Her room had been tended at that time, he had seen that for himself when he had brought her to it. But since then he greatly doubted she had been anything but left wholly alone: abandoned. All the while him thinking his intercession on her part was fully discharged.  
  
He looked down to her, unable to tell if she could understand what he was about to do. She was ghostly even in the light. She breathed, but shallowly, as one might with a fever.   
  
Her bedding showed the fitful rest she had endured over her solitary days. It was untenable that someone should be treated this way.  
  
But then she had no one to do for her, no family or friends present. She employed no servants of her own.   
  
He was no fool. This inn was not the sort of establishment at which any person with a better place to be would linger. He was here looking for respite from his Fate. He knew nothing could come of it - of his aspirations. One could not change the Fate to which he had been born.  
  
He knew enough of the world to know with some assurance that the condition of her present infirmity might well be the reason she had come to (or been left at) this forgotten place alone. Perhaps she was also at wishing to change her Fate.  
  
A scraping at the doorway showed the little serving girl had come back to find him, supposedly with an (overdue and now unnecessary) answer to his questions regarding the lady's health.  
  
"What know you of her?" he asked the girl, his tone firm, his expectation reasonable that the servant girl would know what there was of gossip about the guests.  
  
"She is a widow. Her husband's family has turned their backs on her. She is meant to be traveling back to her own family, but they are displeased at how her marriage has ended and have sent no money for her fare home."  
  
"So she is without an income," he intuited, looking away from the girl and back to the lady. "Has she children?" he asked.  
  
"None but th-this," the girl stammered for a moment to be mentioning ladies' matters to the swordsman, for all that they were standing well in sight of the lady's hemorrhage, "that she has lost."  
  
His mouth grim, he pulled a coin from his purse, knowing now that his coins were the only way to ensure his orders in regards to the young widow were followed. "Do not leave her until I return. Strip the bed of its linens. Find a clean nightshirt among her things. I shall bring her drink." He found himself for a brief moment wishing he had one of his family's servants to depend upon in this moment, but the sensation of longing for the familiar efficiency of la Fere did not last.  
  
"I will fix this, Madame," he said to the lady upon the bed who most likely could not hear or recognize him, with a nod of his head that sent rainwater from his drenched hair toward the bed, and he left the room (window still open) to find and upbraid the Concierge. 


	6. Awakening

Madame Concierge walked past the closed door that led into 'The Widow's' room. She smiled to herself, but did not bother to keep her lips clasped over what her rough life had left her in the way of teeth. The room's debt was paid up, a girl had been summoned from the village to sit by turns with the ill 'Lady' within. And every time that village girl passed through the kitchen door to leave, Madame took her cut of the girl's pay.  
  
 _What, then, could there to be unhappy about?_ She had always said the quiet lodger was her best customer. He asked so little, and even in the past days, when he had begun making demands, it all came about on a blanket of coin.  
  
And when the Lady's health improved, Madame would be sure to remind the woman of their earlier arrangement: payment for throwing her and the swordsman together.  
  
Little matter that Madame had made no true effort toward doing so, and had planned to let the Lady die, and then sell her belongings until the swordsman stepped in. The Lady could never prove anything.  
  
And if she tried to, well, Madame knew a bit too much of this 'widow's' business.  
  
She could ask payment for keeping that to herself as well.

* * *

It was a contradiction, Athos supposed, that he would insist on spending days within the lady's room, making certain she was properly attended, but would then withdraw of an evening for the sake of some shred of propriety, engaging a village girl (located by Madame Concierge) to act as his proxy evenings and nights.  
  
Pretending as though respectability were somehow not at risk during daylight hours; a single man entering a lady's chamber without an obvious purpose, with no connection to the lady, with no chaperone in place.  
  
It still rained, and he didn't care for societal strictures. The risk to the still-recovery young widow should he leave her unattended outweighed what social damage might be done to the two of them in this out-of-the-way backwater of an inn. He would be certain to apologize to her for his flagrant disregard for her reputation (should she live to require it), just as he would apologize for paying up her bills, and accept--should her sense of morality insist on it--her paying him back to keep her from being indebted to him. (Though he strongly doubted she had coin to do so.)  
  
When he arrived at her room just before dawn (even in the inclement weather unable to alter his swordsman's schedule), he would hear whatever report the village girl had for him of the night, pay her, and tell her to come again.  
  
Then he would sit.  
  
Sometimes, he would pace.  
  
He ordered luncheon delivered to _his_ room, but always managed to be in the passage to intercept it from the inn's serving girl who carried it up to him. Once she was back on the stair he brought it with him in here to the widow's bedside.  
  
He would imagine his muscles and reflexes going slack from inactivity, except they stayed in a perpetual state of tension as he watched over this charge he had taken on.  
  
He sat. And watched.  
  
He watched to the point that he could have sketched her, this young widow, his eyes closed, sketched her as a Master might for a painting. She was pale as white marble in those first days, yet hot to the touch. He had water and cloth with which to try and cool her, encourage her toward rest and sleep.  
  
He concentrated his unpracticed attentions with the cloth upon her face, neck and wrists. It was not only societal strictures that kept him from attempting its use elsewhere.   
  
He had requested the village girl dress her hair in a way that it would not interfere, and it now lay, mostly tidy, in a plait to one side.  
  
She did not always lie upon her back, and yet the swells, the crests and troughs of her profile had become as familiar to him as the arch of his horse's neck on a long journey, the turn and balance of his sword's hilt in his hand.  
  
He thought she improved, though she still did not speak, nor open her eyes with any understanding.  
  
Perhaps he would not need to call for the doctor again.  
  
He ordered a rich broth for her, and bid the village girl feed it to her as he left for the night. His only other orders were that the girl keep her clean and comfortable, and come for him should there be anything pass that gave her distress.

She had taken the broth, he was told in the next morning's report. He had arrived with a book in hand, hoping that at the very least reading a swordplay text might unstring some of the tensions he was fighting against.  
  
He paused after every paragraph to look up and assure himself she still breathed.

* * *

At first she had thought she was drowning. Fallen off the side of a boat? Ducked into water? But the liquid was warm, and when she choked upon it, it ceased momentarily from being re-put in her mouth.  
  
This happened several times before her eyes opened and focussed. "What has happened?" she burbled through the broth, asking the unknown girl holding a bowl and spoon.  
  
And the girl told her. She was ill, and had nearly died. The man she had once seen as a potential mark had taken her into his care and support. Her bills were paid. She was safe and able to recover.  
  
She recalled enough (without it being told) to know that somewhere along the way a babe had been lost, to recall that she had reached a point in this room, friendless and alone, where she assumed she was going to die. And she had had no resistence to offer the notion. She was weary, her blood draining away. _I am being punished_ , she had said, almost aloud, though she had never agreed to believe in such a finality of judgement before.  
  
In Sarazin's world (where she had lived since a young girl) believing you were beaten was the same as being so. Tenacity of spirit and contrariness were all that made the difference between survival and hopelessness.  
  
And yet she had done it--even in a half-dead to dying state. She had hooked a new and promising patron. A man already tending to her. She supposed she ought to feel proud of herself, more than a little triumphant. She had tried out some small movements, then, knowing that the longer she was out of the game--the less likely she was to keep such a man.  
  
The attempt at movement proved a failure. And in fact, she felt in herself something new break loose and begin a fresh trickle out from between her legs. As the girl attending her saw to it, she found she could not fight against sleep, and she drifted off. She had spoken no further words aloud.  
  
When next she woke enough to open her eyes to the point they could see with clarity, she thought herself alone. At a sound she turned her head (all there was of her that agreed to answer her brain's requests for movement). The dusty swordsman sat in a chair against the wall. A stiff chair, in which there could have been little feeling of comfort sitting upon. He had turned a page in his book.  
  
She felt her own breaths and thought: perhaps I shall live through this. I shall see Paris again. She lay, thinking those thoughts, for some time, watching the ceiling, other parts of the room he did not occupy.   
  
She felt him looking at her, noticed he was no longer turning pages. And yet he did not address her. He simply sat, looking at her over his book. He was so still as to be part of the room's furnishings, and she realize that their breaths were matched, like twin babes', like mother nursing child. Slow and measured, and without expectation. Mated.  
  
That he did not rise and ask after her well-being puzzled her. That he did not put forth an introduction of himself unsettled her. Perhaps she had mis-understood his motive for aiding her. Perhaps he had aspirations to the Church, and had only meant to assist out of charity and duty, and not at all for personal gain.  
  
And yet the expression about his eyes was not so indifferent. It was keen and expectant, though reserved.  
  
"Sir, I--" she began.  
  
"No," he said, stopping her, though his word was so quietly spoke it may as well have been a sigh.  
  
She looked at him, their breaths still sympatico. She wondered for a moment what she might look like to him. He looked largely the same to her, though perhaps less dusty. His hair had been brushed off of his face this morning, no doubt wet, but had dried at this point in the day (what day, she wondered, was it in this affair?) to falling now and again across his forehead. His sword: belt and scabbard, hung off the back of the chair that held him. The wealthy adorned cuffs of his undersherte came down to the knuckles of his left hand, cast over the chair's narrow wooden arm, and fell beautifully away from his wrist on the hand that held the small book.

"If you decline my thanks, will you then accept a request?"  
  
"What do you need?" his thighs tensed as though he would immediately rise to see to it.  
  
"You can read?"  
  
He nodded a slow assent. "It is a text in Italian."  
  
For awhile she said nothing to this. "How romantic," she said after several moments of silence. "I shall fall asleep to Italian. For all I shall know, it is poetry."  
  
His lip twitched at this, as though it wished to smile. "Do you not wish me to go?" he asked, concern in his tone. "If you are well enough. I should--I should wish to come again, to...assure--"  
  
"I wish for you to read, if you are not otherwise engaged," she did not mean to sound so imploring. "I do not wish...to be alone within this room."  
  
"Of course," he said, what might have been for him, quickly.  
  
He did not reference the earlier danger of her situation. He did not ask her name, nor apologize for his shocking presence at her bedside. He had asked only after *her* wishes.   
  
Her eyes to the ceiling, she listened to the inhales and exhales he made as he read aloud in Italian. She tried to visualize the weight of his coin purse.  
  
And found she could not. The imagery kept morphing into the beat of his heart, near her ear as he must have stood next to her bed, bent close to her face, and the touch of what must have been his gentleman's hand (for she felt she had seen the lace cuffs before, in closer proximity) upon her once-feverish temple.   
  
She tried to concentrate on her mark, and rather than gaining insight into manipulating him she was left only with the sense that she had not been alone, not abandoned in this room to die. And it was too full a feeling to allow room for any other.

 


	7. Stories

He came to sit without fail. The rain continued.

He found the weather disappointed him less, now that he had found another occupation. (Though he did still long to continue his training, the burden of postponing it rested less heavily upon him.)

He read aloud, at some point beginning to translate into French the antique Italian fencing text. He could not recall clearly if she had asked him to do so, only, he knew he had begun to feel she might find a better enjoyment of it if she actually understood what was being communicated.

She never asked questions of the text, nor requested he re-read any section she may have missed by falling back to sleep. So he took it upon himself to mark such moments in his memory and turn back to those lost pages when she was again alert and able to be attentive.

* * *

He did not stop reading the fencing text. Books were dear, certainly, and she possessed none of her own (nor could she have read them if she had). But still, endless one-sided discourse about footwork and thrust/parry. Care and selection of a blade. Finding an opponent's weakness. Antique ideas of male comportment and chivalry.

She no longer thought she would die of loss of blood. It would be, instead, this dry-as-a-crone text of his that would do her in.  
He was not conversational. She had no idea of what took place beyond the room's four walls, and it seemed quite clear to her that it was very likely he did either--for all that he had begun taking his own meals apart from her (and so she assumed he was eating downstairs among the others in the common room, and observing the lives of those around him).

The constant rain and damp began to wear upon her. It seemed an age since she had seen the sun. A man so discreet that she had learned not a thing about him personally was a man hard to grift. What secrets of value to Sarazin could she hope to possess if even the blandest of personal information were held so closely to his chest?

And yet now he held at least several of her secrets. And so perhaps this discretion should encourage her.

And yet, and yet in this room during the hours with the girl he had hired, when he had left and his voice was not speaking on the finer points of attack with a blade, she felt colder. Felt the lack of him, even as she had come to think of him as this droning, passionless pedagogue.

In his absence she thought more on the notion that following great pain and effort many women in her position had a child to show for such difficult work.

But of course she didn't want a child. Of course any child of hers was better for never having set foot in the world she occupied. She did not want to find herself in a position of using her own flesh and blood--of being tempted to use her own babe--as a card she might play in their survival. 

She did not wish the opportunity to make the same choice as had her mother.

She would never know if the lost babe was boy child or girl. She knew only that the life she led was a life for one, a lifestyle of survival skills that were effective only insofar as she remained alone.

Why this simple, long-known truth should agitate her she refused to dedicate headspace to contemplating.

Why the swordsman's reasoned, gentle voice should now make her feel like jumping out of her own skin (a movement she could not hope to presently contemplate), she found she had plenty of unoccupied moments to chew upon.

* * *

She had begun to feel up to taking more control over the hired girl, sending her for things she might desire, or asking for her to go and stand outside of the room for several minutes.

She had finally stopped bleeding, and she knew she must take it as a sign and signal that she must return herself to work. She could imagine no man who might be happy to support her while she remained indefinitely weak and ill. She must find her way (and quickly) back to being that tempting vessel Sarazin had fashioned her into. She must (and it ached, but she pushed it away to think of it) contrive a way for him to bed her. Such a plan was necesary to survival. Necessary to keep the fish once hooked.

A woman without physical and sensual allurements; useless to anyone, save perhaps a life as a laundress. That, she could not risk becoming. She had taken it up herself to work toward walking alone about the room--when the girl and the swordsman were not there. Though her work was to be done in a bed, her strength to enact his seduction toward said bed must be proved first.

She was not so foolish as to believe it was taking anything less than full minutes between her taking steps. Not so foolish as to overlook her need to move grasping hand from furniture to wall to bedstead to affect something resembling balance.

It was difficult, frustrating, and exhausting. She was a-prickle in sweat, whatever the girl had done to her hair that morning nothing but a memory now. Her legs vibrated and shook--though she could feel in her illness that she had lost valuable body weight and inches off her curves. Her hands grew clammy, and had their been a witness to her exertion she would have been humiliated. But she was determined to persevere. She was determined to bury any thought of the almost-child that had nearly stolen her life along with losing its own. Determined to swallow back any hesitance her body's current pain and tenderness brought to her mind when thinking of carnal relations, much less energetic ones. Determined to mastermind the best way of beguiling this sword-loving backward mark into a bed.

At least she meant to be, as soon as she could recover her breath and trust her limbs to hold her upright. Her chest heaved with her efforts though she wore no corset to restrict her breathing, and was, in fact, still in her nightdress. She had both hands to the chair arms of the chair that he chose to sit upon when he stayed with her, and it felt as though to remove even one might prove a mistake. Even to reach out toward the bed, barely three feet beyond.

She heard the girl outside the door shift, reminded herself she had no plans to call upon her for assistance. If I fall she can jolly well pick me up off the floor, she thought, pretending (even while alone) to a steel in her eye she did not possess.

But momentarily it became apparent the girl shifted because she had been caught out by the swordsman's arrival. He was displeased the girl was not within.

She reached--because she had no option--toward the bed (which seemed to be floating far, farther away). Her eyelids fluttered and spasmed. She was alongside the bed--not near any post. Committing to the move, she reached as best she could, not wishing him to see her out of the bed like this; pitiful, weak, in need.

The door swung open by his arm's push-in just as she attempted to complete her move. Both of her hands held nothing as she wobbled away from his chair and back toward where she had for so long rested, but he arrived just in time to see her half-swoon on her way to the floor.

His arms caught her midsection before it fell limp and inelegant upon the cusp of the covers. She shook all-over, unable to control her body's failing reaction to her demands upon it. 

In a way that was wholly unlike her, something in her responded to the delicacy, the encompassing warmth of his present hold upon her, and she spoke consciously, though without consideration.

* * *

 

He had made it through the door in time to catch the young widow as she fell, but the unexpected dead weight of her near-faint had him to his knees, his arms wrapped intimately--unexpectedly--unfamiliarly--about her. Her head had come to rest upon his biceps. But her eyes did not close. They fluttered a moment and then, in what appeared to him to be great pain, and possibly anguish, she asked; "Why are you doing this? It was not your child."

"No," he agreed with her, his voice soft. They had never spoken of the lost child between the two of them. "But it was yours," he said, not entirely certain what such a statement might mean, only that it felt true to him. True, in that moment that whatever was of importance to her, was now of importance to him.

He had no responsibility in regard to that small life, and yet he felt the pull of it, as it pulled, surely, upon her.

* * *

His eyes were so clear as he spoke to her. Like water from a rich man's salver. When he read they tended to be downcast, hooded from her view. But now she looked up, into them. Why would he say such a thing? He could not mean it. And yet he said it, after catching her. Catching her from falling in this wretched state, when she couldn't possibly appear less desireable.

She moved to get herself into the bed, and he assisted. His hands were not stiff, nor formal as his bearing usually bespoke. They were gentle, soft as a young lover's, but not at all imploring. They were hands that wished nothing more than to be of use.

She chastised herself for relaxing at this discovery. Felt as though she ought to bring her will to bear in refusing to allow such a response from her body. What need had she to allow herself to feel like a girl grudgingly complicit in her cage? Dreading her eventual fate at the hands of a man she must willingly seduced?

But she was tired. She had no time for internal monologues. No doubt he would begin to read. Her eyes slid closed.

She did not last to see him look up from his text, contemplate the air between them, and study her full-on over the book's binding from his place in the chair.

* * *

She did not know how much later it was that she awoke. The sounds of his voice, first in the Italian, then in the French translation, pulled her out of her sleep. She opened her eyes. 

There he was: well-made boots but well-worn, gauntlets tucked at his waist, always looking as though at any moment he might burst into _botta-in-tempo_ ; sword never from his side even when it hung upon the chair.

The passage he translated sounded like one of an hundred others he had read aloud. She felt the panic of this room, this situation--this probably still-necessary seduction of him--begin to weigh upon her too heavily.

"You must stop," she told him, her mind unwillingly full of the rhetoric of swordplay. "Tell me a story," she said, suggesting possibilities without entertaining the notion that he might refuse her. "Something of your childhood. Something of your home. ...The day you chose to travel here."

He stopped in his translation. He looked up, his face showed surprise, as if he had not expected to find her _stringering_ him so, directing his present action with an opposite action of her own.

But his recovery was swift. "And if that story involves the sword?" he asked, eyebrow flicking up in one of the more lively facial reactions she had yet seen from him. His eyes betrayed a new curiosity within them.

"At least have it be absent _Signor_ Egnatius," she derided the author of his text, her voice cool and throaty.

"Very well," he began, his eyebrow arched again as his lips nearly drew into a curl.

She would have preferred to watch him, to monitor him for other new facial expressions, new casts to his eyes, but found she had not the further strength for it. She closed her eyes as he began to speak--now without a text as his guide. She thought of her identity here, of Anne's story and widowhood. Anne's desire for a happier ending. She listened as he spoke with all she had.

Out-of-doors, the rain began to dissipate.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *stringering - controlling an opponent's blade by maintaining contact (such as opposition) to it  
> *botta-in-tempo - (attack in time) attacking whilst an opponent is distracted with fending off a parry, bind, or feint


	8. Dreams

He was having dreams. 

Deeply unsettling dreams. 

Not nightmares--no, Thomas' experience with those allowed Athos to rule out that classification for his own nightly episodes. 

Neither were they lust-fueled fantasies. (He recognized those for what they were.)

These dreams were only unsettling upon waking. At night, he dreamed...of happiness. He dreamed of the most ridiculously banal tasks. Walking the grounds of La Fere and Pinon. Sitting beneath a tree in the autumn. Looking over the estate's account ledger. Eating a bun at the family table. Adding a log to the fire on a cold winter's night.

He asked his swordmaster for guidance (without detailing these dreams): how ought one to understand, to interpret one's dreams?

"I am no mystic," the blind sword master had told him, "I have never believed in dreams as portents or portals of any kind. Such dreams come from within you. If they are messages, predictions of a sort, they are sent from dreaming you to waking you. A man cannot dream what is not already within him, however sleeping it might yet be."

Athos was pleased to find the swordmaster's suggestions to be reasonable, rather than rooted in divination or visions. But he wrestled within himself over nonetheless.  
Those banal tasks that now evoked such happiness within him whilst he slept all included (even if she were just sitting, sharing a room with him and nothing else) Anne.

* * *

 

She was getting better. She knew this for certain when the dusty swordsman no longer came to sit in her room. 

At first she had panicked, thinking her catch had slipped the line. She'd refused having her dinner brought upstairs to her room. When she descended to try and see if he were still at the inn, she was relieved to see him seated alone (always alone, him). His reaction to her joining him at table was encouraging, and so they had dined downstairs in the inn's main room for many nights, now.

But the day was coming when even he would have to admit she was fully well and healed, and if she had not hooked him in a way more permanent she would have to decide upon another way to pay her room and board, or steal funds to get her back to Paris, and Sarazin.

These were the thoughts that plagued her at night. Or at least these were the thoughts she told herself plagued her at night. Certainly, Sarazin's especial protege would be awake poring over strategy, unable to sleep because she had no stability in her present situation.

Not because she had waked in the early morning as she heard this swordsman's steps pass by her door on his way to practice with his swordmaster, and at hearing them pause for the briefest moment on the other side, she shocked herself by wondering what might happen if he had pushed in.

Began to wonder and daydream about what it might be like to genuinely be with such a man. Had weak moments of dreaming what it might truly be like to be Anne, the Anne of her cover story, with this man.

She knew that she needed him in her bed if she wished to survive, but she was startled to learn there was a new voice shouting within her alongside the familiar one of survival at any cost. A petitioning voice, deliberate and mournful at times--at others urgent and surreal--letting her know that something within her wanted him more, and differently, than just that.

It was like a thirst, the kind of which you don't notice until it is just about to consume you.

It was a thirst of having been in the cold, the brutal cold since you were a child, and now, being grown, longing to come indoors, into cozy warmth and a drink of brandy.

The name of the dusty swordsman, she had learned, was Athos. He was the oldest son in his family, and he was not married. He cared little for much of anything in the way of company. He appeared to enjoy what conversation she shared with him, but little to nothing of others'. He lived and breathed for the sword. It was something of an accomplishment to get him to laugh aloud. 

And he never opened his letters.

* * *

He practiced.

He responded with new and different steps, parries, thrusts, as the swordmaster (now recovered from the recent rain and damp) instructed him.

The most recent letter that had come to him he had not immediately thrown on the fire. Instead he had thrust it, unopened, within his doublet. It was still there, the wax growing softer as his body's heat and the doublet grew warm with his concentrated exertion.

Perhaps it had been the way her eyes--across the table from him--had caught and sparked on seeing Madame Concierge place it into his hands. Perhaps in that moment it had become more of a talisman of Anne than just another letter likely enquiring when he was coming home.

Perhaps it was that the happiness of his nightly dreaming had begun to seep over into the waking world.

Perhaps it was that burning an unopened letter from his family in front of a woman whose husband was dead and whose family had disowned her struck him as rudely unfeeling.

He powered on, allowing in only the sound of the swordmaster's voice, re-thinking nothing that was asked of him. Willing his body to memorize the paces he was being put-through. Keeping his thoughts, his speculations out of the moment.

The blade was part of him, it had grown in his hand as might a finger from a palm or a hair on his head, and right now, it was the part he gave precedence over all others.

* * *

  
It had been a walk of some distance from the inn (she had no horse, nor way of hiring one), but she had managed to follow him, to discover where he went each day.

It was a dismal patch of a place. Shack and two equally hovel-like other buildings. To call it a farm would be far too grand. The man Athos had traveled from home to confer on his further instruction of the sword had squinty, milky eyes. His voice wheezed and rasped.

He did not appear substantial enough to hold a blade himself.

He sat upon the shack's stone stoop and instructed a man he could not see, using senses she could not possibly credit--other than that the man seemed to comprehend exactly where and in what his pupil needed correction.

She kept to what amounted to the sparse treeline, and watched on.

She had seen sword fights before, of course she had. And knives, and blades of every kind in the slums of Paris. Sarazin had got himself what he thought a fine sword and never went anywhere without it. He fancied himself something of a threat with it.

But she could see now, watching on, what she had known for swordplay before was the difference between flour and sugar. Dry and tasteless (though it alone can get the job done), when here, watching Athos, she saw sugar: sweet and exciting, tempting and crystallized.

He responded perfectly to his master's voice. The blade and the body that wielded it, the concentration--it was a symphony of fluid perfection.

When he finished she could not help herself, she stepped from the treeline.

"We are not alone," the swordmaster said, as Athos stood panting in-between exertions.

He looked up from where he had his hands to his knees and smiled. He did not seem to mind her having followed him, or perhaps in this moment he did not realize how she had come to be there.

"What do you think, then?" he asked, straightening himself and throwing his head slightly back to get his hair off his forehead.

"It was something--" she began, not sure what to say. "It was like poetry," she told him, not even trying to remove the awe from her tone.

" _Italian_ poetry?" he asked, still smiling, making a joke about her original comments on the text he had read to her on her sick bed.

"Ah, mistress is an admirer of Signor Egnatius!" the blind swordmaster announced, and tapped his walking stick on the ground three times.

She laughed. 

And Athos, Athos laughed.

* * *

  
When the time came that he was finished for the day--that the ailing swordmaster could teach no more for the moment, Athos felt he could not let her walk all the way back to the inn. She looked well enough--her color was rosy, as it had been upon their first meeting. Her lips again bright. And her eyes were alert and engaged. 

Nonetheless, he decided to ride her back on his horse, and let her off near the inn, so that they would not return together at the same time.

She accepted.

They were still among the rural outskirts of the village proper, houses were sparse, people were only now coming in from their day's work. They passed but few of them on the worn track.

There was no need to ride quickly, and so she sat, legs to one side, in front of him. At her word that she would rather not have the reins, he had taken them, of necessity putting his arms about her (luckily, he thought--if she were to slip or fall).

Their mood was jolly, light. They chatted, and once or twice she even teased (something that he surprised himself by liking). There was nothing ill-at-ease between them.

And then her face was fully toward him, and her breath was something he could feel exhaling from her nose, but also inhaled through her lungs (about which his arms were placed).

And she kissed him.

It was not a nanny's kiss, though he had known something of those. Nor was it the kiss everyone clapped he and Catherine into sharing under a Christmas mistletoe each year since they had been children. 

Nor was it like other kisses he had known.

It tasted sweet and perfect and tentative, and it made him feel like someone had thrown open a door to a dank, unlighted room out onto a chill winter morning; the sun blazing off the snow and into your eyes until you could hardly open them for its glory, the chill grabbing your body and reminding it you were alive.

But "No," he said, sorry to lose the taste of it. "No, you don't--you don't have to do this." He looked down, his eyes off to the side. His voice had been half-taken from him by the surprise, the brisk but bracing sensation that overcame him.

He knew he was not embracing her; his arms occupied the position they did purely out of utility, but it was a feeling he could not ignore.

* * *

  
She stopped immediately at his protest and did not speak again until they were in sight of the inn.

Her silence had not been the product of his refusal. No, only, his response had given her pause as she realized--quite chillingly--that she had not schemed to create a situation in which she could kiss him. There had been no plan for it. There had been no motive, no careful plotting to it. She had some time ago decided he was not a man to be advanced upon in any way so obvious. He would be, rather, a man she must coax to take the initiative himself, the one to act--not to be acted upon. She could lead him to the cliff, but must not make him jump.

To hurry such a man was to lose him.

_Had it been this Anne, this built and acted character with the disapproving family and dead husband--had she thrown caution out the window in an act of abandon and kissed Athos?_

_Or had it been that other woman that occupied her body? The girl with the name her mother called her that she told herself she could not remember?_

They had been so physically close on the ride, the things they spoke of, the easy camaraderie, the open-ness that seemed to have come over his face when he looked at her. 

She had wanted his mouth on hers the way she had wanted warmth when she was cold, bread when she was hungry, cheese when she had only bread, and coin when her purse was light. He had given her kindness, deference without strings. He had shown her compassion when it was something for which she had never known to wish. Attachment when she had been trained to believe it the thing most to fear.

And as she sat there between his arms, his doublet filthy from his sword work, uncomfortable on a horse saddled for one, she had wanted his mouth, his eyes always to be on her, his laugh always in her ears.

But she had not meant to kiss him.


	9. Opened

They had arrived separately back at the inn, as they had originally conspired. Athos had helped Anne dismount just beyond easy sight of its stables, and any of its lodgers or stray servants. Possibly they were deceiving none with such an act, but agreeing to acknowledge the conventions of gentility, he knew, in general counted for something.

He confounded himself by even thinking such a thing. That going through the motions of respectability created its own sort of pseudo-decorum. _Nothing_ had happened. Surely none could incorrectly apprehend that something had.

His acquaintance with Anne was beyond reproach.

He cast his eyes about these out-of-the-way, devoid-of-all-nobility whereabouts, this dusty, half-abandoned never-had-been-anything-nicer inn where they had both—for quite different reasons—sought lodging. _What, even, about their business—his and Anne’s—could be of any interest to these hick peasants?_ These villagers who themselves would take women into their beds as they chose, living as married until such a day as a priest might travel through and agree to bless their unsanctified union— _and_ the four children conceived in the interim?

_Had he made a mis-step in thinking the strictures of his own upbringing were, in such a forgotten place, less in force? Had he—unwittingly (for surely it would have been wittingly) given Anne to believe that she must play at love with him? That sexual capitulation was something he expected from her for his care, his seeing to her?_

_Did she—could she—resent him for it? Might he deserve such?_

* * *

Athos dismounted first, beyond what Anne understood as his wary suspicion of the prying eyes of the company back at the inn. That he thought he could in some way frustrate the servants and the other lodgers had originally (when she was still ill and realized he was making an effort to do so) made her wish to giggle. It was such a naïve--such an impractical--idea. Yet now she found it touched her in some way, as it seemed clearly he shaded certain moments in their acquaintance not to save himself from any ridicule, but to save her, to save the widowed Anne.

She let him lift her down until her toes settled on the grassless ground nearby the stables. He would ride on alone the rest of the negligible distance back. She would stall some minutes, stretching the space out between their arrivals. Her mind rejected all thoughts once he had gone, other than showing her again and again and again the feeling of his hands supporting her for that moment of dismount until she stood, no longer needing his assistance.

Such a commonplace gesture. How many other men had offered her their hands and arms thus? More than she could count, and most nameless to her—as disinteresting as a mounting block, a short stool, a half-wall of stone. Of those others, she could say nothing; had no thoughts of the surprising temperature of eyes, no appetite for renewing their gloved hands upon her waist. No memory of feeling slightly out of breath upon being set down.

After biding her time, she walked so that she was adjacent to the stables’ path, hoping he might have chosen to curry his own mount, as she had known him at times to do—hoping that she might espy him and casually walk in by the stall, stand just outside it, and if not speak, at least watch on. Watch those hands at work on gentling and soothing, and settling.

And she needed to speak to him—to confront and attempt to repair her mis-step of a kiss, before it grew too large an impediment between them.

But he was gone. One of the inn’s scabby grooms at the task instead. “My sir’s,” he used a generic backwoods honorific for Athos, “a man come callin’ for ‘im,” he said, cocking his head toward the inn. “Right important it sounded. Come from Pinon, he says.” He gave her a squint, as though if she had a coin he could have told her more.

But she had no coins, and for many reasons—not all she allowed voice to—preferred to ask Athos about this courier himself.

* * *

 

Athos had set about grooming Hyperion, his mount. His hand gave an uncharacteristic tremble ( _had he worked his grip so very hard today with his swordmaster that it should give out on him?_ ) and fumbling, dropped the hoof pick. He bent to retrieve it from the straw-strewn floor.

With that motion, the letter he had placed within his doublet fluttered loose, coming to rest nearby the pick. It appeared that the warmth of its place so close to his body’s exertions—even to Anne’s nearness—had softened the wax that had sealed it closed. It now lay, its contents face-up, its papers unfurling.

Even as he reached down to grab and crumple it in his fist, the keenness of his vision betrayed him: he apprehended immediately the content of several sentences. Though the external letter was addressed to him in a man’s hand—not one he particularly recognized (perhaps that of his father’s secretary or steward), the internal letter was in Catherine’s hand. His father and Thomas had fallen ill—would he not respond to his letters—would he, Athos, le vicomte, not return to La Fere, his home, and work to alleviate these extenuating circumstances? The servants were overworked, the fields falling fallow as illness also gripped much of Pinon. Her maddening pleas were all but audible in the stable’s quiet.

He grabbed for the letter, but merely crumpling it seemed too light a punishment for it, now. How dare—how dare such news invade this day, this space. How dare Catherine—of all people—demand he return home when his allotted time here had been clearly and reasonable planned? It was not his time to go yet, to let go of this—his dream, his quest—and what of Anne, should he abandon her to this place and the unreliable future that awaited her here?

No, Catherine (he felt so strongly that, if anyone, Catherine should have been the one to understand this), he would NOT return to La Fere early. People fell ill. It was unfortunate, to be sure. And who was to say that if he returned he, too, would not succumb? If not to the contagion that had felled his father and Thomas, but to the heavy weight of La Fere, of dark enclosed interior rooms, circumscribed futures, enforced nobility—of his birthright?

The letter, after all, was well over two weeks old. What Catherine detailed had no doubt, by now, well passed. It seemed unlikely anyone hereabouts might know anything of the health of Pinon. Still, he might ask if he felt it necessary. Then again, he might well not.

Now, distracted, when a stable lad appeared, he handed Hyperion’s grooming over to him, and made his way toward the inn and something to drink.

So shaken had he been by his encounter with Anne not half an hour gone, and his brain protesting the thought of departing here and leaving her, and yet, as he crossed the open ground toward what Madame Concierge might offer him to drink, the story of Anne—even the thought of her—ended up exiled, locked away in some cupboard of his mind, and La Fere, and Pinon, and Catherine, his father, Thomas, flooded his consciousness so that he felt he might drown, suffocated here in this land-locked backwater, retching fluid from his lungs onto the rock-riddled ground.

_...tbc..._


	10. Gone

He was gone, she told herself for the second time. Lost, slipped the line she had cast for him. She should not have to tell herself a third time. Then again, her physical joints should not feel quite so locked-up, as though she’d been ducked into a frozen pond and could not manage to thaw out, escape from those who had ducked her.

Flight was her only option, and quick. Quick as she could. _Back to Paris? Further out still, into the countryside?_

**To** _Sarazin and his court—or_ **away** _Sarazin, and his court?_

How she wished Athos had invited her to eat something. She could have had one more meal within her, she told herself, one less thing for which she must scavenge and scheme. It was only the loss of the sustenance she regretted, she told herself, grabbing for the first of several handfuls to place in her trunk. But he had made no such invitation.

He had, in fact, barely seemed to note her presence when she found him at speaking to Madame Concierge about settling his bill and buying something of provisions for a trip to come.

How peculiar he had been. How unlike the man she had come to expect to be pleased to see her, a man whom she had come to realize gave her pleasure to see. Anne stood slightly to the side (she had never again needed—not since their original meeting—to draw attention to herself to gain his notice), waiting until he turned toward her.

And waited. And still he did not turn. Not even a nod of his head in acknowledgment.

“When you have these packed for travel, you may see to it they are given to my— _the_ —man lately arrived,” he said, seeming to conclude matters.

_A man, lately arrived?_

Athos turned, his eyes surely must have apprehended her presence, and yet, still, nothing. _She did not like being nothing._ _To him._ He completed his turn and made his way toward, and then up, the stairs.

The concierge turned toward Anne, and the look upon her face at the woman known as Anne was familiar enough: contempt. Yet, a look that since the dusty swordsmen had taken an interest the widowed Anne the other woman had kept largely at bay. There was no such restraint left to her now. Something had shifted.

_Packed for travel?_

Her mind stuttered. _Had her over-step been so very grave?_ She felt flush with a need for haste, felt instinctually that there was no time to lose in setting her error right. Carelessly, she did not pause, even, in her own chambers to freshen her appearance before going after him.

She lifted her hand to knock—the first time she had ever done so—upon his chamber’s door.

* * *

 

He did not startle at the sound of the knock on his chamber’s door. It was too much like La Fere, knocks at the door, servants needing entry, his father, Le Comte, come to track him down.

Athos assumed it was the courier who had arrived, or the meal he had ordered delivered to his rooms—he had no stomach for the public room presently.

“Come,” he said, his voice colorless and without curiosity—as any noble’s might be.

He did not even look away from what he was doing to mark who entered. After a moment his brain did register that no one had spoken, no noise of a trencher or flagon being set down had been made. He looked up.

Before him was Anne. Seeing her, he surprised himself by feeling…nothing. Not the remembered tickle of the errant hair charmingly escaped from her coif against his cheek, not the corset that like a panoply shielded him from her feminine shape, its molded form leant of necessity against his doublet’s front, the heat of which had melted the wax on Catherine’s letter, as he had been so keenly aware when they rode double on Hyperion, back from his lesson but a scant hour earlier. He had been a cacophony of sensations, then, as alive as an exposed nerve.

Now it felt as though he were detached from her by a divisive fog which left her obscured, muted, frustratingly out-of-focus. As though his nerves, what powered his reflexes, had abruptly dulled.

He said nothing, no word of welcome.

“I came to apologize,” she said, and he should have spoken then, but everything in his head seemed to churn twice as slowly as usual. “Today—on your horse—”

“I am leaving,” he said, his words starting slowly until they tripped upon each other by sentence’s end, his mind barely registering the content of what she had been about to say.

“Oh.” Her mouth a perfect, and ideal, oval. “Oh,” she said. “You need not,” she said. “Please, I am sorry. I-I will arrange to go. I did not mean to behave so imprudently—”

“What?” he asked, trying to communicate across the descended fog, the afternoon kiss between the two of them at once as distant as last year’s snow, and yet as present as the shape of her lips as she spoke her dismay. “Why would _you_ go?”

“So that you may stay. Your studies here, your swordmaster’s instruction. You must not abandon it, surely.”

He closed his own mouth, which had fallen open with his realization that she believed her own actions to be the cause of his exit. Fallen open mimicking her own, in another life where he had never seen Catherine’s letter opened, desiring to join his to hers, her breath taken into his lungs, even as now, in this life, he felt hopelessly drowned by the revelations of the past hour.

“I am called home,” he told her. “First, by a letter,” he felt its heavy weight even now, the existence of which was anathema to him, a pirate’s black spot. “And now,” he gave a truncated scoff, “by messenger, sent express to collect me…” he added under his breath, “as one might a delinquent school boy,” he felt his voice trail away as his breath ran short, “or a condemned man.” The words too quiet for her to make them out.

He saw Anne’s back straighten with this news. She was coming into sharper focus now that she was here, that she was present. It had been dangerously easy to lose sight of her as he was overcome with things of La Fere pressing so tightly, over-coloring his vision. Dangerously easy to closet her away in his mind once he had arranged what little he could for her. Easier to shoulder the guilt that he could not do more for her situation when he was not so confronted.

“You may not lengthen your stay?”

“There is illness. My family…has fallen ill.”

“Oh.”

Had that been the best—the right way to explain, he thought? “Do not,” he began. “You must not,” he started again, meaning to address that moment’s intimacy between them, and failing. “I have paid what I could toward your future board here, do not let Madame tell you otherwise,” he turned away. It was easier, perhaps, not to look at her, there. “She and I have settled your rooms through at least the end of the week. I regret that I cannot leave more, but the journey ahead, and its expense—”

“No. No!” she protested him. “I must stand on my own, now that I am recovered. And, you have been too kind, from the beginning of our—acquaintance.”

“Yes,” he said, though he did not mean to sound of agreeing to it. He had been the correct amount of kind, after all. He felt as though a door were closing, a door that would separate them, keep them apart, and he was trapped in a bleak, colorless world without even so much as a window through which to witness and dream of the bracingly bright and colorfully brilliant outdoors. His back remained turned.

“Athos,” she said, and he wondered—had she called him by name before? If she had, how was it possible this voicing of it fell upon his ear so perfectly, so melodiously—as though no other should ever speak the word of it to him again. It was a parting gift he did not deserve.

He turned toward her—but his reflexes, this trained swordsman’s reaction time—proved too late, too sluggish from dread and loathing and what he now realized to be grief, and she had broken off whatever she had meant to say, and he was again alone in an empty room, with only his now-packed saddlebags to partner him.

* * *

He was gone. She had watched him ride out from the inn’s stables from her second-floor chamber’s window, the emissary sent by his family bringing up the rear, following the far more elegant mount that was Hyperion, Athos’ stallion.

His family was ill, he had been called to return home. She told herself not to waste time thinking about such an oblique statement. Sarazin’s doxy spy could not afford to care about wife, child, or betrothed of the men she targeted, though Sarazin’s doxy spy—and Anne— _and_ the woman who chafed at occupying the space between those two constructs--had none of them apprehended the dusty swordsman to have any such domestic connections.

Her bill might be paid through week’s end, but she could not wait to see what week’s end might bring. Life was fluid, and livelihood not easily held onto, as the afternoon abundantly proved. She must make ready to embark on the next public coach.

She was as skittish as a cat put out into the cold, unable to stop moving for the threatening chill all about her. Sarazin’s doxy railed at Anne, at what Anne had fallen for—and taken them all with her. Poor, widowed, simple uncomplicated Anne, this character developed to acquire wealthy men’s patronage, a way into their beds and valuables.

Well, she had managed her way into neither these past weeks. Surely Anne was to blame. No, not entirely. ‘Twas life with Sarazin and the many men he had tasked to her that had birthed an understanding of manipulation. Its subtlety, its intricacies. She had slipped up, perhaps, kissing her mark when it was not to plan. But she could not have predicted she would lose the time needed to repair such damage.

He could not even bear to look at her when she had followed him to his chambers. He had seemed unusually pale under the sun-hardened skin he had earned while at his swordplay. Disliking seeing her, so mis-timed had her instinctual advance been.

_What sort of man did not open his letters?_

Had she but known such a letter might come, she might have—what? Increased the pace of her pursuit? Worked to possess him more aggressively? Turned her grift into a simply robbery?

 _Sacre_ , she knew the answer, and it showed what a disaster she had let herself become since the loss of the child. She would have savored every possible moment in his presence. She would have been tempted to abandon the Anne persona altogether. She would have implored him read to her from Signor Egnatius. She would have lived twenty lifetimes at this inn, and sworn to herself to recall each in perfect detail no matter what might follow. She would have lain herself, like as a faithful hound, upon the threshold of his chamber door of a night, so that she might be the first to see him of a morning, and the last before he retired to bed.

She was horrified to learn, to understand how deeply unhappy his departure would leave her. How dissatisfied she began to apprehend she was soon to become. She worked faster to pack—grabbing things of hers as well as anything in the room not specifically nailed down.

This had never been a part of her before, this understanding—this capacity of feeling. Early days there had been a time she had thought she loved Sarazin, but such uniformed, ignorant foolishness she had shed soon enough in light of his treatment of others—of her. But not since then. Men were either by-turns sweet, or despicable. And even the sometime sweet ones grew despicable easily enough in private company.

She was completely shaken by her discovery. She saw about it nothing in which to revel. It frightened her, and left her certain of only one thing: she could not return to Paris—to Sarazin—with this overpowering secret inside her. She had to run—quickly in the opposite direction until she could master it, conceal and possibly eradicate it. Then, then she could return—several new conquests in hand to soften Sarazin’s anger upon her delayed appearance.

She would murder Anne, construct a new identity for herself during her flight from here by coach. She would—she must--forget this inn—deny her mind the memory of all that happened here. She must not stop moving, must not settle in, not accept the fickle lure of security. Not even that purchased board, available to her through week’s end.

‘Twas rest had brought her to this. Rest, and unearned kindness— _they_ had betrayed her.

_...tbc..._


	11. Freed

Athos knew any onlooker would have said he and the arrived courier rode at a brisk pace on their return trip to Pinon. But logically knowing this to be the case did nothing to convince him. In his mind, he trudged away from that backward inn, dragging his feet with every step away from his master’s hovel, the widowed Anne’s chamber, the fireside table at which they had shared meals so many times. Trudged like a man in mud so deep it threatened to suck off his very boots.

It was worse, perhaps, that it was a journey he could not even make alone—the courier sent from La Fere having been told he’d not be paid until he returned with Athos, and Athos’ own coin grown too scant to make up that difference and dismiss him after he had paid for Anne’s lodging, and his master’s promised wage.

* * *

He had still been in the grip of Catherine’s pleading letter when Madame Concierge had come and found him at a table in the public room, where he was seated, drinking alone.

“Man for you, My Sir,” she said. “Come from Pinon.” She had come to tell him directly, rather than just pointing the man this way, Athos knew, because she hoped (at his expense) he would bid her feed and water the man arrived from a journey of such length.

He did not.

When the man approached his table, he held out a letter. Athos did not extend his hand to take it. “What news?” he asked, without true interest, knowing such a courier would have some, if not all, the information the letter held.

“My lord is wanted at La Fere,” for the courier well-knew Athos’ rightful title.

“I am aware of this.” Athos’ replies revealed no heat in temperament, no seeming investment in the answers he received. He was benign, placid, his tone mild and removed.

“I am told your return is urgently called for.”

“Of this, also, I am aware.”

“Will you come, my lord?”

“What concern is it of yours?”

“My payment is contingent upon returning you, and with the dispatch in which it is done.”

Still, the letter hung in the air.

“There is sickness in Pinon?” Athos asked.

“Grievously so, I am told.”

“You are not aware first-hand?”

“I am employed out of Parne, Monsieur le Vicomte,” he referenced Pinon’s closest urban neighbor.

Athos tired of the letter, there, extended between them. He reached for it with intent to toss it into the fire beside which he had positioned himself.

It was a mistake. By taking it into his grip, he recognized the script upon it as though like a snake, it had bitten him. Thomas’ hand. Gritting his teeth, he tore it open.

“ _Athos, You must come straightaway. I beg you, Thomas_ ”

It was an exceptionally short letter, and would be an expensive one to have sent by this hired rider from Parne. He saw in the handwriting that Thomas was not quite himself; there appeared over-much effort in the swirls and curls of his brother’s usually confident script, several spots where the pen had lost ink and stuttered. He tried not to imagine it having been written on a lap desk whilst his brother struggled to pen it from what was understood to be his sickbed.

This was Catherine’s doing, he thought (only the second uncharitable thought he had ever had about her), this flourish, putting his sick brother to work to call him home. ‘I beg you’ Thomas had written. He exhaled a sigh. It was untenable.

_And as for his father? As for Le Comte?_ Very well, Athos would return, as so ruthlessly beckoned. But once everyone’s recuperation had been affected, Le Comte would have to renegotiate his eldest son’s liberty again. He, Athos, was owed more time. He had been promised six weeks. And he meant to see that promise honored.

“We leave within the hour,” he told the courier. “You may wait for me here,” he pushed his cup toward the other man, and indicated the bottle from which he had been drinking. “I will see to our departure.”

* * *

Athos increased Hyperion’s gait. The next inn on the Pinon road, where they would water and very briefly rest their horses, was within a quarter-hour’s ride.

* * *

She found no rest in the public coach that had left the inn, and (thankfully) left Madame Concierge—with whom she had bartered to pay for her ticket, as she would be leaving the room Athos for which Athos had left payment. A ticket that would take the gentlewoman widow Anne only so far, before she would need to purchase another to travel on, and need a new identity to match it as well.

It would not do for Sarazin to find _Anne_. Should they meet again (when she had managed to recover from her realization of utterly impractical attachment to the dusty swordsman), it would be best it were _she_ who approached Sarazin—not he who found her out. Controlling such a narrative, arriving as a conquering hero rather than a runaway associate, was imperative to success and survival in Sarazin’s world.

She had told herself she’d have hours to craft a new story, settle on a new name before she would need to make use of these new trappings of identity. Plenty of time to scheme and plan. And yet she was frittering it away, her mind still chewing over the startling ease with which Athos had managed to extricate himself from her, and seemingly without the smallest shred of regret.

So consumed was she in poring over the last twenty-four hours with him, the times she had been in his company—she had missed entirely when, at the coach’s second stop, a respectably-dressed man of some means (nothing too flashy) had raised his eyebrows upon marking the charming young woman across from whom he was about to sit on his coming journey. Had she been more herself, more attentive to such things, she would have granted him an unforgettable introduction ten minutes gone.

As things stood, he had fallen into sleep, his mouth half-gaped, snoring sonorously, annoying the rest of those aboard the coach. Even at this, she marked him not.

* * *

The courier reckoned aloud that, allowing for their mounts to rest, they were yet three hours off from Pinon, La Fere twenty minutes beyond that.

“Ye shall sleep in your own good bed tonight, my lord,” he had reminded Athos.

Athos had strongly wondered if he would ever sleep again amongst the rooms of La Fere’s chateau, which spoke to him only of restraint and imprisonment in a bleak, disinteresting future.

“Perhaps,” the passing thought came to him from seemingly out of nowhere, “it is the feeling of such oppression men attempt to flee by choosing, instead, their mistress’ bed.”

But mistress, if he had—or desired—any, for him would be, only, the sword. And the sword cared not where its master slept. As he walked away from the unwanted company of the courier, his mind begged the question of him: _what did a Musketeers’ bed rack, then, look like? Single, to a room? Or many lining the walls of a great, long hall? And when sent on business for the King, where, then, did a Musketeer, these men of the sword, lay his head?_

He had been heading off back toward the stable—Hyperion’s company about all that he could stand, when the clatter of a rider coming at great pace into the foreyard of the inn stirred up dust and clamor enough to distract even him.

He cast his gaze toward the cloud obscuring the rider—and his arrival.

“My Lord! My Lord!” came the call of the courier. “’Tis for you, this rider! News! News!”

Athos stood his ground, feeling no compunction to travel more closely. The two men, then, were left with nothing but to approach him. The new arrival, he found he knew. Mathieu, a groomsman at La Fere. He could not ride a horse elegantly, but had always been able to ride them fast.

“My lord, Athos,” Mathieu greeted him, and with the impatience born of many years of having to live through hollow pleasantries and meaningless honorifics, Athos cut him short before his speech became any more florid.

“Speak,” impatience echoed in the demand.

“I come bearing—”

“Speak,” said Athos. Why someone should ride hell-for-leather to locate him and then prattle at length upon their arrival, he could not abide. “Don’t babble.”

“You father, Le Comte, is dead,” Mathieu said, as instructed, to the point. He withdrew a packet from a thong about his neck, pulled something out of it, and perhaps, knowing Athos, (that he would not reach for the thing himself) reached for and secured Athos’ hand, into which he dropped a small, gold ring. “ _You_ are Le Comte, now, my lord.”

Athos felt the weight of it on his finger, without looking at it: his father’s signet. Sign and seal that represented Le Comte de la Fere. The noble symbol of identity. What he should have felt about his father’s death, he could not say. Perhaps would never be able to say. A Comte departed this world, a new one was baptized into it. He had spent his life being educated on what this moment would mean, what this vast, inherited responsibility would entail.

But what he had not realized—what no one had _ever_ told him, suggested or even intimated—was that, until this moment he had been a falcon, blindfolded and on a tether, master of no one’s fate, allowed free only at the beck of his master. And then, with a soul winging (he assumed) to Heaven, departing this world, and a ringlet now upon his finger, his Fate had changed forever. Changed, because now, _now_ it was in his hands alone. He was subject only to the King himself.

“Thomas?” he asked, not needing to be more explicit. _Was his brother also soon to die?_

“Master Thomas improves more with every hour,” Mathieu reported. “’Twas himself it was bid me bring you the signet. He’d strength enough to stand by your father’s bed at the end.”

At that, Athos felt that falcon’s tether fall away. Blindfolding hood gone, he saw more clearly than he had ever done before.

“This man needs payment,” he told Mathieu, of the courier. “You may tell my brother I shall arrive at La Fere in three days’ time.” In truth, he cared not if Mathieu performed either duty.

“You will not come with me, my lord—for the sake of your dead father?”

“No,” he said, and there was no need to color it with any tincture of annoyance or impatience. Simply, ‘no.’ “I have business elsewhere.”

Mathieu and the courier—equally taken aback by his reply--were still standing, shocked, as moments later he rode Hyperion out of the stables, back in the very direction he had just come.

_...tbc..._


	12. Found

She had yet to engage a room with the inn at which the public coach had stopped. She had no coin to pay for such a room—yet, she told herself. _Yet._

But she would need to do so before nightfall. Her new cover story (once she had settled upon it) was not to be one of a woman who might hazard spending the night among rough company in an inn’s public room without a chaperone.

An older—elderly, even--female chaperone, of course, would lend a terrific air of respectability to her identity. Sadly, it would also increase her necessary cost of living by two-fold. An inadvisable risk, and a reason she worked alone.

She attempted what she could (and she was very practiced at such attempts) of a proper toilet, refreshing her hair and frock after the day’s journey. She managed to enter the stables when they were not otherwise occupied and find some coin (not much, hardly enough to be missed) carelessly left among someone’s saddlebags. She did not even know from whom she had stolen it. All the easier to behave as though she had not, in ignorance to embrace her own innocence.

And coin enough in-hand to pay for a meal and a bottle of wine (not merely a cup) would garner her perceived credit, and when she asked for a room for the night they would give it her, expecting payment when she quit the place. By which time she had every reason to believe she would have payment, or have found another way ‘round paying it.

As for the man on the coach, she had gotten back her sea-legs enough to have taken his measure by now. He was not so big or important a mark as to have anything to interest Sarazin. But his coin was enough to make him just the right size fish for her to cast a line after, on her way to hooking a larger catch in days to come. Certainly, she could ascertain with confidence, he had coin enough to pay the way for two—on coach, at inns, for whatever might befall them once she threw her lot in with his.

She had seated herself by the inn’s public room fire, sitting with her cape’s hood still upon her head, throwing just the right amount of shadow on her profile. Mystery was good, she knew, in increasing a man’s interest. Already, she knew from experience, the question of who the finely-dressed lady was, traveling alone and taking her meals in the public room had the inn’s inhabitants in the grip of attempting to discover her story.

If only she could settle on what that story was. The interrupted story of Anne and Athos would not release its hold on her consciousness. Even now, as she stared into a bowl of what stood for soup at this inn, she caught herself reminiscing about what she had once discovered was Athos’ favorite dish. Trespassed on her own better judgment by briefly imagining him here with her, across the table, a plate of _Anguilles au vert_ in front of him. This chic dish of cooked eels in white wine with spinach and sorrel leaves, something she, in her limited encounters with such gastronomically ambitious dishes, could not quite fully imagine.

When he had mentioned it—as he had ever mentioned so few things—she had tried to get him to describe it to her, the flavor of the eel, the texture of the greens. The saccharinity of the wine.

But it had been impossible. Athos, not well-designed to such effusive reportage, and her palate, so little-practiced at enjoying food beyond its being something to consume and service her belly. _Was it sweet?_ She had asked as he gave a chuckle, confusing her. Sweets (as few and far between as they had been for her), those superfluous treats that her life had so rarely allowed her, the only language she had to understand culinary delight, to understand savoring a taste, a swallow.

“Not sweet, no. It is delicious,” he had said, and she had caught, there, for perhaps the first time, something alluring and deeply magnetic in the way his eyes looked at her as he spoke his reply. She felt the pull of it, she knew— _she knew_ —he did to. It would take an eunuch to miss such a thing. It lasted longer than she would have expected in most men, who had learnt to bury their desire, their thirst for a woman, until a more private encounter. It was as though he had only just discovered something, and he let it exist, turning it over in his mind, investigating it.

She took another spoon of the inn’s stew into her mouth, her reverie ended. She cast a glance toward her new mark. He had slept enough in the public coach that he was quite lively now. She felt confident that within the half-hour he would present himself to her, ask her to call on him for any need she might have.

She turned her face back toward the fire.

* * *

He had returned to the backwater inn, fully expecting to find Anne there. She had not been. Madame Concierge had been taken aback to see him, even in his singlemindedness he could apprehend this.

“Converted her room’s board into a ticket for the public coach,” Madame had told him. “Had new guests wanting that room, and them able to pay beyond the week’s end. Why not send her on her way? What she wanted, anyhows.”

“What was paid you would have bought more than a ticket on the public coach,” he had reminded her.

“If my Sir wishes to take another room, we may deduct the excess from that bill,” she had proposed, no doubt thinking herself a clever bargainer, and if he had not been in such a hurry, she would have had a fuller sharing of his mind on the matter. As was, he required the difference from her, cash-in-hand, before he rode off in the direction of the public coach.

He was at least half-a-day behind in his pursuit. Darkness fell, and he found a spot away from the road to sleep a few hours with Hyperion tied nearby.

He could not risk spending what coin he did have remaining, not when there was still a return journey to make, and payment needed then, possibly two-fold.

* * *

The inn on the coach road proved slightly more posh than that of Madame Concierge’s backwater of an establishment. Following her meal, she had been asked if she should wish to sit in the modest ladies’ parlor, used by women on stopovers for changing coaches when traveling by public coach, which effectively kept them separate from the rougher denizens of the inn’s public room. The space was little more than a fireplace, two small sofas, and a window of no great size. It did no particular credit to the innkeeper that he chose to burn no greater than two candles within it, unless one paid out for more tapers to be lit.

Still, it had been offered her at no charge, and considering it was the genteel option, one of which she ought best to make use.

The room was small bordering on cozy, and it was no time at all, as she sat alone, that she turned uncharacteristically drowsy. When the door opened, she had found herself in that inexact state between asleep and waking.

A man entered. The light was so low from the lack of candles, she could make out little else besides the shadowed outline of his sword.

But it proved enough.

The doorway gaped open behind him. Of course Athos would not endeavor to close it, for propriety’s sake. It was irregular enough that he had made his lone way into the ladies’ parlor without being a relation to one present in it.

She felt the brisk breeze of chill sweep into the room with him, and her momentary drowsiness was snatched from her, and she returned to her usual state of heightened acuity. “Sir,” she said, and her tone revealed every one of the mixed emotions she felt upon his unexpected and unexplained appearance.

Though the relative darkness largely hid his features from her, her mind told her she saw his mouth pull to the side, something of a smile, upon finding her seated before him.

She stood.

* * *

His voice was slightly winded, though the journey to this room from the floor below was one of fewer than ten (irregularly crafted) risers on the stair. “It is you,” he said, though seemingly more to himself than to her. “They—the innkeeper—did not recognize you by name.”

She had not given them a name, having not yet decided on her new one.

“I was—I have—ridden—and to again miss you—” he began seven thoughts and completed none. Even so, the quarter-smile on his lips persisted.

It was odd, to hear him go on so, in a way so unlike the man she had schemed to get to know. She had stood upon his entrance, but did not speak again. She had to confess to herself she had no clear notion of what he had come all this way for. He hardly looked of a man overcome with a desire to bed her. There was a lack of lustful intensity about him. His posture was loose rather than sprung. He spoke more, and in a less censured way, than a man charged with needing a desperate passion sated. And he appeared too pleased with finding her to be here about the monies of his she had converted into fare for the coach.

It was true, the widow Anne would have been throat-in-heart at his appearance here. But she had been at work murdering and burying Anne and her story for hours, now. And yet—and yet—that long ago banished young woman within her, who had existed before Sarazin, who was the daughter of her traitorous mother, held _s_ breath, had to be restrained from taking a step towards him.

“What of your family?” she asked, when, for a long moment he spoke not, only looked at her. “What of your sick wife, your children?” Perhaps she asked it to recall to his mind he ought to leave here, to leave her to her necessary work, rather than stay and derail her precarious plans to forget him. Yet it was a statement more Anne than Sarazin’s doxy, than her mother’s daughter, who took what they wanted, without a care to how others might suffer for it.

“I have no wife,” he told her, if anything his quarter-smile increasing. “Nor children.”

“You were not called home to them?”

He shook his head. “I was called home to my family; my father and brother, who had fallen ill. My brother is recovered. My father has not.”

“My condolences,” she was about to say, when a noise at the door of the parlor caused both of them to turn toward it. It was the man from the coach. His clumsy gait, compromised by drink, had sent him to lean heavily upon the doorframe.

“Madame!” he called out to her.

She was about to beg his pardon, as she was already speaking to a gentleman, when, to her surprise, Athos stepped toward the doorway, and shut the door in the tipsy man’s face.

With the door shut, the heat of the fire became more apparent, the chilly breeze locked out, and Athos, seeming to forget propriety altogether, stepped further into the room which the two of them alone now occupied.

“What is left of my family was ill,” he continued. “My father, my brother—the village nearby our chateau.”

“Chateau?” she asked, not having to fake surprise at the mention of it.

“I have not been truthful with you, Anne. Or at the least, not fully forthcoming. I am the eldest son of Comte de la Fere, and so, his heir.”

She heard the other man attempt another knock on the parlor’s door, or perhaps he had fallen from being so far in his cups. His existence mattered not at all to her now, as the trio of women within her felt their desires dovetail like tributaries into a strong, rushing stream, at Athos’ continued speech. _Heir to a comte? A chateau?_ Such a man—a noble, such a country living surely could protect her from Sarazin’s reach. Her thoughts got no farther, Athos was speaking again.

“In my life, I have cared for so very little. My horse, the sword; by-times, my brother. But I find I have no wish—no will, even—to return to La Fere to live without you. To travel anywhere away from, to be separated from your company.”

It was the doxy spy in her that surveyed him for any manner of tells, but as always, with Athos, she found none. He simply meant what he said. She watched on as his sword hand clenched and un-clenched with his next confession.

“You are precious to me.”

Her own hand she felt turn cold with perspiration. She slid it surreptitiously along the fabric of her skirt to try and dry it off. Her breath may have become slightly held.

“With my father dead, I am become Comte, and am empowered to choose, and am able to support and care for, the wife of my _own_ desire. I desire your presence in my life, Anne. I want no one else.”

She blinked twice, fast, uncomfortably taking in more air through her mouth. She felt over-filled. Was she, perhaps, still trapped in that twilight? “How is it you have arrived here?” she heard herself challenge him, but not the emotion with which he spoke. “And so soon after your departure?”

He did not seem troubled by her questions. “A courier met us on the road with news of my father’s death.”

Her brow ticked together, only for an instant. “And you did not return home first?”

He let his hands fall open, to either side of him, as a man might who has nothing more to hide. “My father is dead, my attendance upon his remains can offer him nothing. I returned for you, but found you had left the inn.”

“There was no longer anything to keep me there,” she said, her blinking now slowed, as she was loathe to take her eyes off him.

“And so, I have traveled to find the someone I wish so fervently to keep.” His boots and sword rattled as he took further steps toward her. “I am not a man of great eloquence,” he said, “which perhaps in such a moment one might wish to be. I am unable to consult your own father in arranging for your hand…”

His face, as he approached, had come more fully into what light there was in the room. “My father is dead,” she told him, which was a twenty-year-old truth. “I have broken with my family. My choices long ago became mine alone.”

He now matched the steadiness of her own gaze. “I have left word that I shall return to La Fere in three days’ time,” he told her. “I shall overnight in Hyperion’s stall. Will you grant me an interview in the morning?”

And here it was her turn to grow a quarter-smile. “Are you so uncertain of your plighted troth you expect you must wait to have your answer of me?”

His lips came together, and he lightly shook his head. “I make no pretense of knowing your mind.”

“Do you not?” she asked. “You have restored my life to me once, I am convinced,” and here came the disagreement she could not shake, this impractical, unpragmatic voice she could not seem to stifle. “But I am a poor choice for a new-made Comte. Another man’s _widow_?” She used the more socially convenient term rather than ‘a non-virgin’. “A widow, with no money or family connections with which to enhance your title. A woman who has lost the only child she may ever bear. And may, quite possibly, never be able to give you an heir. Do you not see? If you choose me so, Athos, I am _all_ you shall get.”

His gaze remained steadfast. “There is money enough, and more status than I should well like already. As for heirs, I do not doubt my brother shall sire sons by the threefold, strong and perfectly positioned to be named heirs to Le Comte—should such need arise.”

He must have seen, have read in her eyes the question she did not ask: _And so, I am wanted for--?_

“Until our time at the inn,” he said, close enough now she could feel his breath, see the rise and fall of his chest, “I was never in a room I would not rather have been alone in. I had never found anyone it gave me joy to read to. I am not prepared to lose that, if it might be regained.”

“Will you kiss me, Athos?” she asked, taking something of a risk, “here, in this parlor where we are alone?” _Had she brought him to the brink? The brink upon which she now knew herself unexpectedly to stand, as well?_

_Did he propose a marriage merely of companionship? Someone to read to? A cherished pet? A lady to decorate his chateau? Or did he desire everything a lover might? He had spoken not a word of heat, of thirst, of bodily desire._

Why it should matter when he had offered her more than she could have ever expected out of life, or grift, she could not have voiced. Only, it did matter.

His answer came not with words.

She found herself surprised to sense his ardor in the kiss quite quickly. It was not at all a repeat of the kiss she had earlier initiated, and from which he had withdrawn. She let herself be kissed, in a way she rarely, if ever, had had such luxury. She needed to accomplish nothing, here. She had no need of seducing him in this moment, nor of impressing him with her various skills and wiles, as would have been the case with the men of her intimate acquaintance.

This was not the kiss of a disinterested man, not the kiss of a gelding. She let it go on as long as he might like. He had her full attention.

When he pulled away, her hand still to his cheek, she spoke. “You have your answer, my lord,” she said, “I will go to church with you, and my heart shall ever be yours.”

_...tbc..._


End file.
